Social Justice Blog

A documentary film titled “Flow” will premiere at the Sundance Film Festival this week. The film condemns water profiteering and calls upon the United Nations for a resolution to make access to clean drinking water a human right.French-born director Irena Salina points to Suez and Vivendi Environment for commercializing water systems around the world and […]

Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzales at Democracy Now! just posted an interesting interview with the New York Times’ David Cay Johnston. The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist just published “Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (And Stick You with the Bill).” Johnston’s contention is that American policies and programs have taken money […]

Erica Barnett over at Worldchanging.com has an interesting post exploring the latest crisis in the world’s food system: affordability. She takes apart the Economist’s investigation of the growing problem, which reports that the world price of wheat rose to $400 a ton (twice the inflation-adjusted average price of wheat over the past 25 years), and […]

Bill Becker, executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project, brings the costs of clean energy and an energy-efficient economy versus the costs of doing nothing into clear focus in “The High Costs of Doing Nothing, Part 1.“Consider the numbers from a University of Maryland study he points to:combined storm damages at more than $560 […]

Tomato pickers in Florida might lose the first significant raise they’ve received in thirty years, because Burger King is trying to undermine agreements made with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers to pay an extra penny per pound of tomatoes. These workers earn about 40 to 50 cents for every 32-pound bucket of tomatoes they pick. […]

Overcoming opposition from China, U.S., and Iran, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution today “calling for a moratorium on the death penalty, with the ultimate aim of abolishing capital punishment.” Amnesty International heralded this moratorium as an important way to “encourage retentionist countries to review their use of the death penalty.”104 UN member states […]

Lawyers argue that detainees at Guantánamo should have the right to habeas corpus. The U.S. Supreme court is considering whether detainees should have access to courts.Hospital worker and teacher Adel Hamad is released from Gitmo and reunites with his family in Khartoum. See also “Poems from Guantánamo.” Gawker (yes, Gawker) in a fantastic case of […]

The Writers Guild of America continue their strike against studios, since negotiations this week did not satisfy both parties. For those unaware: writers, actors, and directors are on strike asking for 2.5 cents per every dollar made by media conglomerates when T.V. shows and films are aired over new media channels (free episodes streamed or […]

“This is a story with which you are probably familiar. But these are in no small part symptoms of a larger transformation of the relationship between employers and employees, in which Americans increasingly sign away their humanity when they sign an employment contract.”-Paul Waldman-In “Woe is the American Worker,” Waldman questions why our presidential candidates […]

The idea that capitalism can save us from climate catastrophe has powerful appeal. It gives politicians an excuse to subsidize corporations rather than regulate them, and it neatly avoids a discussion about how the core market logic of endless growth landed us here in the first place. World governments are meeting this week in Bali, […]

“…We are all suffering from this split agenda — as consumers we want low prices, while as citizens we may oppose corporate behaviors that make them possible. And [Reich] believes — at least on a national scale — our citizen selves are losing.”-Terrence McNally-Read McNally’s interview with former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, who has […]

According to a 2005 report of the International Centre for Prison Studies in London, the United States—with five percent of the world’s population—houses 25 percent of the world’s inmates. Our incarceration rate (714 per 100,000 residents) is almost 40 percent greater than those of our nearest competitors (the Bahamas, Belarus, and Russia). Other industrial democracies, […]

Get that idea off the ground and become a fellow with Echoing Green, an organization that invests in and supports emerging social entrepreneurs as they look to launch solutions with substance. (It is also named after a William Blake poem).EG is accepting fellowship applications now through December 2 (Yes, skip the early holiday shopping for […]

More than three thousand people are dead, and a million are now homeless in Bangladesh. The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies is reporting that the amount of damage caused is hard to gauge, but will only escalate within the next few days:Even as the tally of the number of victims of […]

For people not familiar with Pakistani politics, the recent uproar and attention in the news about General Musharraf’s imposition of martial law can seem confusing, to say the least. While opposition leader Benazir Bhutto is being painted in a positive light by most media giants, her record of human rights violations and corruption is vastly […]